Federal prosecutors have urged U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to modify Sam Bankman-Fried’s bond agreement, saying the disgraced crypto mogul may have engaged in “witness tampering” by sending encrypted messages to a potential witness.
In a four-page filing put forward Friday, prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had tried to contact “the current General Counsel of FTX US” through the encrypted messaging application Signal and email on January 15. While identified in the filing only as “Witness-1,” Ryne Miller is FTX US’s current counsel.
“I would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other,” U.S. prosecutors allege Bankman-Fried wrote.
Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried has tried to contact other current and former employees of FTX as well. And his desire to “vet things” with Miller suggests an effort to influence the testimony of potential witnesses, they argued.
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As a result, the filing called for preventing Bankman-Fried from reaching out to current or former employees of FTX and those at his trading firm Alameda Research—unless he is joined by a lawyer or granted permission by the government. As prosecutors note, this is not an uncommon pre-trial restriction.
The filing also asked Judge Kaplan to prevent Bankman-Fried from using “any encrypted or ephemeral call or messaging application, including but not limited to Signal.”
Prosecutors said that banning Bankman-Fried from encrypted communications channels would prevent obstruction of justice, as Alameda CEO Caroline Elison–who has pleaded guilty to financial crimes and is cooperating with investigations into the collapse of FTX–told them that Bankman-Fried was aware of the ramifications of the automatic deletion of messages on platforms like Signal and Slack.
“Many legal cases turn on documentation and it is more difficult to build a legal case if information is not written down or preserved,” Bankman-Fried had indicated to Elision, prosecutors said.
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It wouldn’t be the first time Bankman-Fried’s bond agreement was changed. Bankman-Fried was prohibited from accessing or transferring funds related to FTX or Alameda after a request was made at his arraignment earlier this month, where he pled not guilty to a series of financial crimes.
In response, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers submitted a letter on Saturday opposing the prosecutors’ request, outlining their own version of restrictions that could be placed on communications for Bankman-Fried instead.